Getting His Kicks on Route 66Cruisin' Down the Mother Road in Stirling Silliphant's Mind

Article by JOHN M. WHALEN

A SURFER IN MALIBU, WHO DOESNT LET ANYONE KNOW he secretly has a job as a bus
boy, tells the guy who exposes his secret, “Youre just another wave Im
going to let pass.” A girl who lost her family in a shipwreck, cruises
the highways of the nation quoting Zen on a Harley, trying to out-run grief. A
trail guide in Arizona who blends in everywhere like a chameleon, becoming one-third
of wherever he is, says he only wants to become three-thirds of himself. These
were the people you were likely to meet any given Friday night between 1960 and 1964
on the CBS television series, Route 66.

The series featured two guys, Tod Stiles (played by Martin Milner) and Buz Murdock
(George Maharis), who drove the legendary highway in a Corvette searching, not so
much for themselves, as for a meaning, a purpose, a place that would give them a
reason to set down roots. Along the way, over four years, what they found
was a 1960s American landscape populated by unforgettable characters following search
patterns of their own.

Named after the great “Mother Road,” the show was filmed on location
all over the United States, photographed against the backdrop of real towns and geographic
landmarks.

It presented not just the actual people and places, however, but a unique vision
of that time and those places—the vision of the series co-creator and chief
writer, Stirling Silliphant.

Silliphant was one of the most prolific writers who ever lived. He wrote
two-thirds of the 118 episodes of the series, and went on to become a big-time Hollywood
writer and producer.

He won the Academy Award for In the Heat of the Night and wrote scripts including
Charly, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, The
Enforcer, and was co-producer of the Shaft series. Hes
credited with 37 film titles.

No one knows how many hundreds of TV scripts he penned. He died in 1996
after expatriating to Thailand.

David Morrell, author of First Blood and Brotherhood of the Rose, says
that Silliphant believed he had lived in Thailand in a past life. He told
Morrell, a close personal friend, that he was “going home.” He
held a yard sale at his Beverly Hills home, sold everything, and moved to Bangkok
in 1989. He never came back.

But in 1960, when Route 66 premiered, Silliphant was 41, strong, energetic,
and full of stories to tell. In fact, only the year before, he had written
38 of the 39 episodes of Naked City starring James Franciscus. Like
that series, Silliphant himself, still had about 8,000,000 stories left to write.

He traveled to all of the locations used on Route 66, arriving six weeks ahead
of the production crew. He said in newspaper interviews at the time, that
he would walk around, get a feel for the place, go to his motel room, and, in a few
days, come up with an original script using the setting and characters that seemed
relevant to their backgrounds.

In an Oregon fishing town, he wrote about an angry dock fighter, with a buried past,
who drank and brawled to forget the men in his Army squad that he led into ambush. In
Phoenix, he wrote about a crop duster, a former English airman who believed he carried
a jinx that brought death to anyone he let get close. In New Mexico, he
wrote about a nuclear scientist who lead a group of followers down inside the Carlsbad
Caverns because he believed that a nuclear attack was about to end the world.

Every week a different place, every week a new and compelling story. Critics
talk about the Golden Age of TV in the 1950s but, in many ways, the Route 66
years stand alone in terms of quality writing and acting. The show attracted
some of the top names in film, stage, and TV as guest stars. People like
Joan Crawford, Michael Rennie, Dan Duryea, Lew Ayres, and many others asked Silliphant
to write scripts for them. In addition to the top names, many unknowns
like Robert Redford, Harrison Ford, and Ed Asner got their start on Route 66. Directors
like Sam Peckinpah, Elliot Silverstein, and Robert Altman also worked on the series.

But it was the stories that got you hooked, that brought you back every Friday night
at 8:30. Stirling Silliphants stories captured America in the 1960s. They
were stories about a post-war American society that had a sub-population made up
of the dispossessed, the disenchanted, societys rejects. The guys
in the Corvette had rejected conformist America in favor of a life on the road, so
they could afford to be a little more generous to the disenfranchised.

Silliphants scripts often focused on characters that mainstream society found
unacceptable. The stories always scratched through surface appearances
and, through the course of events, we usually found our first impressions about these
“lost souls” were wrong. And in almost every program the services
and institutions society sets up to help these people were shown to be inadequate. It
was usually up to Tod and Buz to help these characters find their salvation.

In “Birdcage on My Foot,” Robert Duvall played a heroin junky in Boston
who tries to steal the Corvette. The local public health service isnt
equipped to deal with his problem, so Buz helps him go cold turkey.

In Tucson, they meet up with Vicki Russell, the Zen-drenched babe escaping grief
on a Harley. Played by Julie Newmar, Vicki ends up in jail when she amuses
a bored cop by deliberately running a red light and leading him on a wild chase through
the city. Only Tod and Buz will go her bail, and when she appears in court,
the judge decides the best way to handle her is to banish her from the city limits. Tod
and Buz try to connect with her but shes somewhere on another cosmic level,
and, in the end, they part on the highway, the motorcycle going south, the Corvette
headed north.

In El Paso, a woman returns to her job at a cotton oil company alter spending seven
months in prison for a crime she didnt commit. Even a well-meaning
parole officer believes she really did it. But Tod and Buz prove she was
framed by wealthy cattleman, Lee Marvin, who wanted to punish her for resisting his
advances.

A town in Mississippi has isolated itself from the world because of a dark secret
going back to World War II. Tod and Buz arrive and are nearly lynched
for discovering the secret, but by revealing the evil, the two drifters not only
escape the noose but also heal the town.

Sometimes the two central characters were the focus of the story. Tod
had been raised in wealth and received a Yale education, but when his father died,
he found out the business he owned was bankrupt. The only souvenir of
his former life is the Corvette his dad had given him just before he died.

Martin Milner, who began acting in movies in 1946, was perfect for the part of the
erudite, yet down-to-earth Yale graduate, whom circumstance had sent out on a highway
odyssey. Tod was the intellectual, who was able to quote Shakespeare and
Freud, and was something of an idealist. He often had his ideals challenged
by some of Silliphants storylines.

In “...He Shall Forfeit His Dog and Ten Shillings to the King,” he witnesses
the mean, murderous behavior of a posse searching for two suspected killers in the
desert near Superstition Mountain, Arizona. Their actions seemed based
on the idea that you cant feel important unless you hurt somebody else. At
the conclusion of the story, hes left standing in the desert shouting, “I
dont believe that Ill never believe that!”

Tod always seemed to fall in love with the wrong girl. In “Suppose
I Said I was the Queen of Spain,” he falls for Lois Nettleton, who turns out
to be some kind of kook who cant remain in one identity for very long.

In “The Cruelest Sea of All,” he actually gets involved with a mermaid,
played by Diane Baker. In Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida, hes working
at a tourist attraction featuring live “mermaids” performing an underwater
show. One of the girls turns out to be an actual real-life mermaid who
swam in from the Sargasso Sea. He falls for her, but thinks the mermaid
act is just some kind of “shtick” to get publicity.

Hes too “smart” to think she could be for real. In the
end, he pays for his inability to believe with a broken heart, when she leaves him
to return to the sea.

Buz didnt fare much better with the ladies. In “A Month of
Sundays,” set in Butte, Montana, he falls for Anne Francis—a Broadway
actress who has come home to die. Here again, the medical community can
do nothing for her, and even a clergyman seems to provide no solace for the dying
woman. Its only Buz, who says, “Her favorite day is Sunday.
Ill give her a month of Sundays,” who is able to ease her pain.

Buz was an orphan, raised on the streets in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood
of New York. Less educated than Tod, he acted more from instinct. When
he witnessed a wrong being committed, he didnt stop to think about it. He
just swung into action.

The part fit George Maharis like a glove. A New York method actor, he
was dark, brooding, and always on the verge of exploding.

In “The Newborn,” when the Santa Fe ranch owner he worked for told him
to get a rope to tie up a pregnant Indian woman, Buz jumped off a wagon and said,
“Mr. Ivy, I quit,” and socked him on the jaw.

In the third year of the show, Maharis dropped out because of illness. Glenn
Corbett joined the cast in 1963, playing Lincoln Case, a special forces Army Ranger,
just home from Vietnam. Even at this early stage of U.S. involvement
in that conflict, Silliphant wrote about its impact on our society.

Another displaced person, unable to readjust to his former life in a small Texas
town, Linc joins up with Tod on the road, leaving the past behind. In
one particular episode, his experience as a jungle fighter comes in handy when he
goes into the Florida Everglades with Tod and Sessue Hayakawa in search of a former
World War II flying ace, played by Jack Warden. Warden is sick of the
banality of his current life and has crashed his plane in the swamp deliberately. Hayakawa
is an old enemy, a former pilot for the Land of the Rising Sun, who now lives an
unrewarding life with his son and daughter-in-law in Baltimore.

Tod, Linc, and Hayakawa parachute over the spot where the wreckage was sighted, and
search until they find “Sans Everything” written in the mud. Its
from the “Seven Ages of Man” speech in Shakespeares As You Like
lt. “Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything.”

They find him in pretty bad shape, and he doesnt want to go back. He
wants to be left there to die. They bundle him up anyway, make a raft,
and float him up river, back toward civilization. On the way, Hayakawa
reminds Warden of their glory days and the dogfight in which they each thought the
other had been killed.

Theres a shot of a Zero and a Navy Hellcat, flying over their heads there in
the Everglades, as they recall the old days. Then Warden, suddenly inspired
to live again, looks at his former foe, and says, “Alright, lets get
this tub moving,” and dies.

“What a senseless way to die,” Linc says.

Hayakawa answers, “He died well. He died wanting to live. One
smiles.”

Route 66 was television as it had never been before, and has never been since. It
presented a rare and unprecedented view of America in the 60s — the good,
the bad, and the ugly. It was individualistic, unconventional, and totally
on the side of societys underdogs.

And every week, somehow, Silliphant always managed to grab you, shake you up, make
you aware that youre alive. Like that World War II ace played by
Jack Warden, Silliphant made you want to say, “Alright, lets get this
tub moving,” The highway the show was named for exists now only in crumpled
fragments, in some areas of the midwest and the west—long ago made obsolete
by the Interstate Highway system. But the towns, the characters, the stories—the
vision of Stirling Silliphant—will live on for as long as there are fans left
to remember.